The Poyson Garden (18 page)

"Look, lads, a knotted cord. Someone been here and escaped. Fetch his lordship."

Elizabeth and Ned dashed around one corner on the sloping grass between the walls and the moat. Then, while she held their bolsters, Ned tore around another corner before coming back, breathing through his mouth more raggedly than she. Even on this side of the quadrangle, more windows both upstairs and down were showing lights.

"No boat, the bastards," he muttered. "I'll try to heave these sacks across, then if you just get in the water and float on your back, I'll try to pull you over--"

"Listen!" Elizabeth cried, grabbing his arm at the muted sound. "They're putting the drawbridge back down. If we can get to it before they do ..."

But the muffled creaking was coming not from the bridge but from the moat itself. From rusted oarlocks that moaned each time Jenks pulled hard on the oars to span the fifteen feet of water to get to them in time.

She opened the door to her chamber after the worst of the banging and voices in the hall subsided.

"You there, sirrah," she said, gesturing to one of Waldegrave's men. "To me."

He was the last man in the hall as the others ran down the corridor toward the stairs. Even through the fine lawn of her veil in the dim light, she could see he wore his blond hair shaggy and a stubble of beard gilded his cheeks; his shoulders looked broad and his waist narrow. Yes, he would do quite nicely, that he would. She hoped he didn't smell of sweat, but she had aromatic remedies for that.

She could see him hesitate. Despite his size and bulk, the familiar look of fear glazed his features as he stared at her. Finally, he found his tongue.

"But, good madam, his lordship says we're all to haste outside and find the intruders what mayhap lit the rick too."

"Did they now? But they were in here, too, that they were." She gestured again with one white hand that emerged from the sleeve of her sky blue robe. Her veil moved against her mouth when she breathed or spoke. Sometimes she thought she should go only half veiled, as the women of Araby, to show her eyes. She had fine emerald eyes, her father used to say, and a bounty of hair black as the bog of Tralee. But the skin around her eyes--

"I'll tell his lordship straightaway," he said but didn't budge.

"I must show you the evidence they were here," she insisted, her voice soft and silky. "And you must search under my bed to assure me your lord's enemies are no longer in my chamber."

"Oh, right, then. Just a quick look, then," he agreed and shuffled in. He jumped when she closed the door behind him. She knew she made men nervous going and coming alone as she did, and the veils, of course, though some found them utterly intriguing--until they peered beneath. If only she

could find one man, of any rank, both clever and strong, she'd keep him for a while instead of trying out something new on him and being well rid of him by the next day.

"And who might you be?" she asked.

"Owen, good madam. Want me to look under the bed, then?"

"I have not a doubt in my mind they were here, Owen --see?" she said as she walked slowly closer and pointed to her leather box of concoctions, shoved halfway under the bed to catch the counterpane.

He hunkered down to look, as if handprints and embossed names of the intruders would stand out all over it--though she doubted he could read.

"And," she said, "someone has gone through my coffers, there's no denying that."

"I'll fetch his lordship, so he can come up to look," he said, obviously fearful to glance at her again. She had sat on the coffer at the foot of her bed and let her robe split open far up her bare, crossed legs, though he kept peering under the bed, which was obviously too dark to see a thing. "They'll miss me down there, and we gotta catch--"

"I'm afraid they'll be gone by now, with all that shouting in the hall. Rather like the little people--the fairies--who do their naughty deeds in the dark but flee before they can be caught. So now we've settled that you've volunteered to protect me the rest of the night--"

"Eh?" He jerked to his feet like a puppet, then began to sidle toward the door. When she rose, slowly and sinuously, he stood stock-still but snatched off his cap and rotated it in his big, square hands.

With a predatory smile he could not see, she said, "I know his lordship would be wanting you to help me, just in case they do return."

"But you said you thought they were gone, so--" "A spot of wine then?"

She silently cursed that she'd gotten a man who was acting more like a nervous squirrel than a lusty goat. She began to lose her hard-won temper after being bested by the Boleyn forces once again this night, even though she'd known they could be coming. But breaking into a moated castle? When others forced her to turn choleric like this, she always slipped back more into the brogue of home.

"Just be having a bit of wine with me then, and you can go tell Lord Waldegrave you deserted me in

my hour of need."

"Oh, no, didn't mean that. I wouldn't do that."

"Good. Very good, Owen," she said, her voice almost a chant.

She crossed to the small table in the corner by the door and poured spiced and drugged wine into her own goblet from the ewer. She used valerian root herself to sleep sometimes, but now, her back to Owen, she added a pinch of nightshade, always good for quick drugging of victims for robbery or even murder.

He took the wine and gulped it down. "Much beholden."

"And I too. Now, let me tell you," she said, lifting a hand and stepping forward when he made for the door, "the list of things I think might have been taken from here, so you can be telling his lordship. Here, man, just sit down on the mounting stool by the bed for a moment, will you? You're worn out, I'm sure, fighting that fire and then guarding the castle."

"Nary a bit, good madam, and don't want to be a bother."

But he sat heavily, hunched over, his elbows resting on his spread knees. She took the empty goblet from his unresisting fingers. His words and breathing were already slower. He'd not get up again till morn, and that was certain. The fine thing was, the potion didn't put a man clear out but made him able to be coerced and plied to one's will yet recall not a thing.

She locked her door and lighted a gillyflower-scented candle. Though the night was chill as one in Carrick-on-Sur, she removed her robe and even her cap and veil. In her thin linen night rail, she turned down the wick of the lantern until it gutted out. She'd just be letting the moonlight do its work, she thought.

She did not wonder if Waldegrave had caught whomever the Princess Elizabeth had sent--if, as before, she had not come herself. But she could afford to be a bit patient now. She knew she was destined to face and deal with the royal Boleyn in person, for there was no denying destiny. That would be God's justice for all she and the queen --and their sainted mothers--had lost.

By the time she was ready to return to her big bed, the man was slumped half on the stool, half on the mattress. She wrapped her strong arms around his flat belly and, grunting and groaning, hoisted

and dragged him up the rest of the way to lay him the length of the bed.

He flopped where she put him, muttered something, and began to snore.

Methodically, she stripped off his garments, threw them in a corner, and washed him in rose water with lavender. The sweet scent of that lingering tomorrow would be enough to make him keep his mouth shut about what might or might not have happened this night. He was well-endowed and would react well when she rubbed up his thighs and stimulated him with the oils, but she was suddenly exhausted and didn't bother. She only wanted to pretend--to drift away, drift back.

"You know, me lad," she said, kneeling over him while he slept on, "me mother was the mistress of a grand man, a wee bit taller than you but just as golden-haired. Slept in her bed every night, all night, couldn't leave her alone. She held him nigh on seventeen years, my da, and he gave us all sorts of fine gifts. He loved us both till it got ruined, that it did."

She heard herself slip more into the brogue of her childhood again, but it didn't matter. This man would never give her away. He would be loyal. And if she chose any vial from under the bed, he would never, never leave her.

Suddenly, fearful of the whole, horrid memory of her father's loss, she cuddled desperately beside him, one bent knee draped over his slack thigh. She threw her top arm over his hairy chest and wedged her forehead in the crook between his chin and shoulder, settling closer, shutting her eyes, pretending that he held her.

She wanted to make it all come back, the safe, sure times. She wanted to be her mother as she'd seen her many a summer night when she'd sneaked in behind the arras to watch her lying in her handsome father's arms in those happy days before King Henry had her father poisoned.

Suddenly enraged, she sat up and half-shoved, half-kicked the man out of her bed. He hit the floor with a crack that could have been his arm bone, groaned, then shifted to snore again. She yanked the bedclothes up to hide her face and sobbed wretchedly until she could barely breathe.

Chapter The Thirteenth

"Nary a word in this one about Waldegrave being in on the poison plot," Kat observed as she, Ned, and Elizabeth skimmed the last of the letters taken from Hever.

Elizabeth had called the second clandestine midnight meeting of what she had dubbed her privy and covert counsel. So far, Meg and Jenks sat silent, as they could not read more than the alphabet Ned had been slowly, secretly teaching them.

"But these letters do prove that Waldegrave is Spanish Ambassador Feria's spy in

Kent," Elizabeth noted. "The wretch has been fingering key anti-Catholics whom Feria and Mary have ordered burned at the stake. And Waldegrave's been harboring a poisoner. He knows, at the very least, that She is planning to murder hundreds of my loyalists near Leeds, so whether he knows She wants me, too, is a moot point. 'So blood," she added, smacking the epistle with the royal seal down on the table, "I shall send him to the Tower for his treachery someday."

Her foul temper at what she'd overheard at Hever had not been one whit improved by the fact they'd made a clean escape. Thank God, Jenks had seen Ned and her dangling on their rope before that lighted window and filched the boat to rescue them.

But she had not gotten off scot-free. Though her nose was not broken, it was badly swollen, and her left eye had gone black and blue. She had told the Popes that she had run into a door and that Meg was rubbing it with plantain paste. All of that, at least, was true.

But she hated looking like this and feeling as if she had the most wretched cold. She had to breathe through her mouth like the village simpleton. And she had nearly bitten poor Meg's head off this morning when she'd tried to tease her by asking if she should start learning to talk as if her head was all stuffed up too.

"So we know a great deal more than we did," Ned was saying.

"True," Elizabeth concurred. "We may have no written proof linking Waldegrave--nor my royal sister--to the plot to poison me, but ..." Her voice snagged, but she'd finally said it

aloud. It was what she feared, that the queen herself--

"Don't think it, lovey," Kat protested, reaching out to pat her hand as if she were but ten years old. "All the ups and downs the two of you royal half sisters have been through over the years, despite your differences--well, she is fond of you. Deep down, she is, I know it."

"And deep down afraid of me and what will come after--if--she is gone," Elizabeth said, wiping under her nose with her scented handkerchief, which she could not even smell. She jumped to her feet, paced back and forth, then sat back down. Everyone's heads turned in unison, like at a tennis match, to watch her. "She no doubt," she said more quietly, "has night terrors that I will undo her holy work, expel her friends, turn on her Spanish husband ..."

"And won't you?" Ned challenged, one dark eyebrow gone atilt.

"No theoretical questions," Elizabeth evaded him, stopping her steps to rap her knuckles on the table. "We must deal with the here and now. And that is this heinous plot, which has spread like wildfire from my aunt and cousin Harry to me and now threatens loyal English folk. I overheard

Waldegrave try to bargain with her--with She-- to spare his workers at Hever in the mass murder she has planned, but I warrant she'd just as soon kill every last one of them who would back me for the throne."

Kat clucked and shook her head. Ned sat grimly staring at his folded hands. And Jenks, damn him, was studying Meg and not paying the slightest heed to his royal mistress. But what she had just said about a wildfire plot reminded her of something else.

"Can any of you think of a way She could use fire to kill a great lot of Kentishmen near Leeds?" Elizabeth asked them.

"Waldegrave said She would use some sort of holy fire, and he mentioned a saint's name I cannot recall."

"I heard him say that--St. Anthony, I think," Ned chimed in, looking up. "But why would a master poisoner suddenly switch to using fire, and in rainy Kent? And what edifice could be large enough that she could try to trap and burn that many folk?"

"I don't know," Elizabeth admitted, "unless she means she'll burn Leeds Castle

itself. I've never seen it, but I hear it sits in a lake, so even a huge conflagration would be contained there. But hundreds burned?"

"Mayhap," Kat put in, "you misunderstood what you overheard, and they were talking of giving more names of men around Leeds for the queen's burnings of martyrs. Hurrying to wipe out hundreds more during her last days if the belly tumor is really eating her up like they say, so--"

"Speak not of that," Elizabeth insisted, wrapping her arms around her own flat belly. Though it was the only way she could ascend the throne, she was uncomfortable with talk of her sister's death, even among these people she had gathered for herself and trusted.